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The model for such CEOs is, of course, Steve Jobs, who co-founded Apple (AAPL) and much later purchased and headed what became Pixar. However, Jobs captained both companies for only one year, which he called “rough, really rough, the worst time in my life.”

How are today’s superstar multitasking CEOs doing it? And what is the personal cost to their profit-driven lives?

For serial entrepreneur Marcia Kilgore, who once ran three companies simultaneously—London-based Soap & Glory and Beauty Pie, and New York’s FitFlop—overseeing multiple businesses was a kind of personal insurance policy. Kilgore declined to be interviewed for this article. But earlier this year, she told National Public Radio that “you don’t give up your day job because you think that your...side hustle, or whatever it is, is going to actually pay off. You always do two things at the same time because one of them may not work, and you want to make sure that you’ve got another one.”

Like Jobs, she ultimately bowed out of the part-time CEO business: After selling Soap & Glory and FitFlop, she now runs only Beauty Pie.

The stocks of some of the companies mentioned above have seen quite a bit of volatility, but they’ve mostly done well for investors over the past two years. However, their chief executives declined to discuss that or their job-juggling with Barron’s.

Eric Flamholtz, the president of Management Systems Consulting and a University of California, Los Angeles professor who has written books on leadership, isn’t surprised that these CEOs might not want to talk about their multitasking. He is skeptical of any chieftain’s ability to manage more than one company. “I am concerned that they are spreading themselves too thin. I just don’t see how it’s possible to do it well.”

Constantine Alexandrakis, head of U.S. business for head-hunting firm Russell Reynolds Associates, agrees. “It’s a hard sell for a board of directors because running just one company should take 150% of a CEO’s attention,” he says. “How would the CEO split his time between entities, and how would it all work?”

Roy Hessel, now 39, once ran three online eyeglass and contact-lens companies, located in different countries. But managing more than one is not optimal, he believes. “There’s plenty to do at one company.”

Hessel’s companies were all in the same industry, but at different stages of evolution when he brought them into his portfolio, making them easier to supervise individually, he says. He founded EyeBuyDirect in Shanghai, and sold part of it to Essilor International (EI.France), a publicly traded French eye-care outfit that kept him on as chief executive and later asked him to head both FramesDirect in Texas and Vancouver-based Clearly.

“If you have a clear vision that is well understood by all of your employees, it can all work out OK,” Hessel says. “You can look at the operations and consolidate manufacturing and reduce costs, translating into value for all of the companies. The same is true for buying materials, chemicals, coatings, and other components because we had economies of scale and were able to negotiate lower fees.”

When Hessel took on FramesDirect, he replaced the founder-CEO, which was “not a simple task.” But “the place needed a real change of pace. It’s easier to build a company than re-engineer and change one,” he contends.

Hessel tried to hold on as long as he could. He did it by relying on his management team because, he says, “I could not be in three places at one time, and there was only varying degree of detail I could get into. I also knew that I needed to be very careful because the companies all operated in the same space, so to manage companies that compete and overlap is sensitive.” He solved this problem by “setting parameters about what is being sold and where geographically so that each would have some advantages and win in some markets.” Still, he said, “some things get done ad hoc.”

Hessel acknowledges there were disadvantages to overseeing three businesses, including taking time away from his family. Earlier this year, Hessel abandoned his jet-setting ways and sold his remaining stake in EyeBuyDirect to Essilor.

Here is a look at how some other multicompany CEOs juggle their responsibilities:

Carlos Ghosn once steered three international car companies, in three different languages, which together were responsible for 10% of all the cars produced globally. But in 2016 he gave up his obligations at AvtoVaz of Russia, and in 2017 he stepped down as Nissan’s CEO, but remains as chairman of its board.

Ghosn heads the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance, which is joined by a cross-sharing agreement encompassing 450,000 employees. Renault owns a near-44% voting stake in Nissan, which holds a 15% (nonvoting) position in Renault, effectively giving the French company control. The alliance’s financial performance has revved up recently, despite negative currency effects and higher raw-materials costs. Renault announced record profitability of 6.4%, up from 6.2%, in the first half of 2018.

Still, shareholders haven’t benefited much, as the stock price is almost unchanged from its level in the summer of 2016, trading around 72 euros per share.

The multiple CEO roles have also taken a personal toll. Ghosn has told reporters over the years that he lives a life “almost like a monk,” mapping out his schedule 15 months ahead and distributing it widely. He reserves plane flights for sleeping and says he insists on focusing only on the company whose name is on the local headquarters.

He has said, “I start with the principle that when I’m in Japan, I’m making decisions for Nissan. When I’m in Paris, I’m making decisions for Renault.…I don’t mix the different responsibilities because I just want to make sure the different teams in charge feel responsible and there is no confusion between the different companies.” The bottom line: “You need to make sure that you are where you think you are indispensable.”

Elon Musk spends most of his time at electric-car company Tesla, which continues to lose money and which Musk himself has called a “drama magnet.” But he also captains rocket manufacturer Space X and now spends time at three other companies he has founded, including the Boring Co., which plans to build a tunnel-based transportation system.

Musk told reporters that he works about 90 hours a week, mostly on engineering and design, ignores most email and phone calls, and gets only about six hours of shut-eye. He also said that he wouldn’t recommend running two companies; “it really decreases your freedom a lot.”

How much? Musk says he breaks his entire day into a series of five-minute slots, even eating lunch in five minutes or less, often during a meeting.

Given Musk’s schedule, it’s no surprise that his behavior can appear erratic. Tesla’s losses continue to raise substantive questions about the company as a going concern, as Musk burns through cash ($739 million in the second quarter) and bullies analysts and critics on Twitter tirades.

Tesla’s shares have hit speed bumps in the past two years, trading as low as $181 per share and as high as $389. After Musk said last week that he is considering taking the auto maker private, the stock jumped and then gave up most of its gains; it’s now is around $350, versus $290 just days before it reported earnings on Aug. 1.

Although Amazon, like Tesla, doesn’t seem overly focused on its profitability and share price performance, the similarity ends there. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a fundamentally different approach to management, and it’s paying off. Although he also captains the space exploration company Blue Origin and The Washington Post newspaper, Bezos’s management model seems more akin to that of Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett than to Musk’s.

‘“It’s a hard sell for a board of directors because running just one company should take 150% of a CEO’s attention,” an executive head-hunter says.’

Buffett has CEOs at each of the companies in his Berkshire Hathaway portfolio, and he runs them largely independently, as a kind of manager of managers. Similarly, Bezos has chief executives who oversee Blue Origin and The Washington Post. And he manages other companies through his venture-capital vehicle, Bezos Expeditions.

Delegating authority seems to make for a nicer lifestyle than does running multiple organizations. Bezos has spoken about “work-life harmony” and doesn’t schedule early-morning meetings. He applies a “two pizza rule” to meetings: Two pizzas have to be enough to feed everyone in the room.

In a 2015 letter to Amazon shareholders, Bezos described two categories of decisions.

Type 1s are mission-critical, high-impact choices that influence the larger strategy, while Type 2s are the lower-stakes choices that can easily be reversed, if need be. Bezos leaves all Type 2 decisions to the teams and individuals on the ground, while the people higher up focus on Type 1 decisions.

Bezos has said that he doesn’t try for perfection: His goal is to draw the line at 70% of the perceived ideal information After that, the company focuses on making corrections. This explains in part why Amazon is able to move quickly into new markets, but is flexible enough to make improvements as needed.

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It also might explain the company’s success: Amazon reported a big beat on its second-quarter earnings, with particular growth coming from its cloud services—historically its profit engine—and advertising. Earnings of $5.07 a share were more than double estimates and more than 12 times the amount in the year-earlier period. In the two years through Thursday, Amazon’s stock price had soared from about $770 to around $1,886.

The bottom line may be that taking on multiple CEO roles can be personally exhausting and tricky, but for a small number of truly disciplined and organized managers, it can work—at least for a time.

The issue for boards of directors and investors is to understand how part-time CEOs organize their time and their decision-making, since “it’s likely to happen more often,” predicts Alexandrakis of Russell Reynolds. “As the world becomes more connected and industries become more intertwined, we may see more companies coming together, and that could result in more of this phenomenon.”

It already is: In June, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan Chase, and Amazon announced that they had tapped thought-leader Atul Gawande to head their new joint health-care venture. Gawande, founder and executive director of health-care innovator Ariadne Labs, is also a practicing surgeon, author, and staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He has stated that he will not be stepping away from his other commitments to head the new venture.

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn is a professor at Columbia Business School and author of Problem Solved: A Powerful System for Making Complex Decisions With Confidence and Conviction.

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